Wednesday, December 31, 2014

What can be done about the gender problem in economics?

A little while ago, I wrote a Bloomberg View article highlighting some research showing that the economics profession is more biased against women than are the natural sciences or the other social sciences. Following that article, I received quite a number of emails agreeing with what I wrote, and offering opinions about what can be done.

By far the most common suggestion was just to raise awareness of the problem. The modal comment was something along the lines of "I never realized there was a gender problem in econ, but recently I've started noticing it more and more." That is very encouraging. The more economists realize that something is fishy, the more they will act to counter it in their daily lives.

Raising awareness can be done at the individual level and at the official level. Regarding individual-level awareness, Frances Woolley has a great blog post on the subject:

"Sexism" is not the result of some high level conspiracy. It is the product of millions of every day actions by thousands of ordinary people...

[A] scholars's reputation and impact is determined by the decisions of others: who they choose to acknowledge, who they choose to network with. Every single active academic can, through the citation and other decisions they make every day, influence other academics' reputations - and thus the probability that they will receive tenure or get promoted.

Who do you cite? If you're like most people, you're more likely to cite the seminal work of some well-known male academic than the work of a female scholar...

Do you give women credit for their ideas? Just about every woman has had the experience of sitting in a committee, saying something, and having her contribution ignored. A man will then restate her point, and he is listened to, and receives credit for the idea...

How do you word your letters of reference? Do you use the same adjectives to describe women and men? Or are women delightful, pleasant, conscientious and hard-working while men are strong, original, insightful and persistent?

Who do you invite to present at conferences or departmental seminars? If a man, do you turn down invitations to participate in conferences with all-male line-ups (see the gendered conference campaign)? Do you make it easy for female colleagues to come for a drink in the bar after a seminar by corralling them into the bar-going group?

The economics profession is far from perfect...and the power to change it lies within every one of us.

Well said.

Woolley also points out some potential problems with Ginther and Kahn's research (which inspired my post). But that doesn't diminish the case for raising individual awareness in the way Woolley describes.

As for official awareness, things get trickier. As Woolley points out, it's the natural instinct of organizations like the AEA, universities, and journals to try to fight discrimination by giving women more responsibility. But in academia, responsibilities - like department chairs and committee memberships - are often detrimental to a professor's career rather than helpful.

A better way, in my opinion, is to strengthen and increase support for organizations designed to investigate and highlight the gender problem. The main such organization is the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, an AEA committee. The AEA might, in the future, increase the committee's size and funding, or perhaps the number of paper sessions allocated to the committee. It also might promote the committee more prominently on its website and in the events at the annual meeting.

How can journals help? Well, they can invite some publications by top researchers on the subject of gender discrimination in econ. As Frances Woolley points out, Ginther and Kahn's paper leaves some stones un-turned. The more research there is on the topic, the more we will know about exactly where the problem lies.

A final player is the media at large. The media can help highlight the increasing contributions of female economists, instead of ignoring them.

The overall hope here is that gender discrimination in economics is like the Phillips Curve - that the more we believe in it, the more it goes away in reality. Ideally, everyone should do their part.

Update: Here is a piece in Quartz by Miles Kimball and an anonymous co-author, giving first-hand accounts of the culture of sexism in econ.

I knew a learned academic in the field of chemistry who said that whatever field of learning you touched on a Jew was at the top or near the top. He made the statement in admiration and I repeat it in admiration. In economics they are especially brilliant.

Don't know. But if not so much in engineering then they must have chosen not to enter that profession. If so in engineering then, hey, well, case proved again. I did hear of a former Rabbi who turned humourist that Jews were not interested in farming but I think he spent all his time in the USA and had never been to the Negev desert to see the drip irrigation projects. Drip irrigation is also sort of engineering and Israel is credited with the invention of the same and further proves my point. Nuclear weaponry. But maybe bridges are falling down in Israel. Don't know.

Interesting! This is relevant to my interests as I just finished sending in all my PhD applications. Strangely I haven't noticed too much of a gender divide in my undergrad program, but it seems like grad schools skew like 2/3 male. For me, having really good relationships with a few female professors has really been encouraging, but I definitely see how the faculty who take a more active role in advising undergrads would have much less time for their own research. I think often, in all fields, women are sort of pushed into these roles because they're more "nurturing," and certainly we want to have great mentors and well-organized systems. But when it comes down to it we just don't value these roles the same way we do groundbreaking research.

I think you need to get more women in institutional positions in university faculty and economic positions in the government - and then encouraging much more mentoring and assistance to new female students in graduate economics.

If results in economics were as precise as in the natural sciences, then gender would matter less. The pure fact of being right or wrong would matter more. But as it is, personality, chuzpe, or networking matter more. The 'good old boys' network probably prevents female economists from reaching the top, much like chauvinism and physics envy does. The gender divide that exists in (american) politics is also in the field of economics. It could be seen in the resistance against Janet Yellen, the "dove".

It sounds as if you think that physicists spend their time taking multiple choice tests, where being "right or wrong" is all that matters.

When doing research, being right is only a minor hurdle. The real challenge is producing research that's important and innovative. In theoretical fields (macro economics, theoretical physics, pure math) importance can only be judged by insiders, and is very subjective. In more applied fields (such as labor economics, applied statistics) importance can also be judged by those outside the academy, and so I think there is less discrimination against women in these fields.

Well, physicists can agree on the value of the physical constants which constrains their possible results, while there is hardly any constant that economists agree on, for example, how high is the fiscal multiplier? You won't find an agreement between, say, Robert Lucas and Christie Romer.

Surely, 'good' research is what contributes to our understanding of the world around us, either by inventing new methods or by finding verifiable results and while these criteria may be subjective, the existence of and agreement on physical constants constrain what can be counted as important research in physics. I mean, economists cannot agree on a single consumer utility function, which means that DSGE models cannot achieve a degree of precision comparable to, I don't know, calculating the course of a spaceship under the influence of several gravitational objects. Every woman with the adequate mathematical knowledge can do the latter, while the 'importance' of DSGE models depends on the acceptance of their assumptions. I could imagine that women might very well design DSGE models that are more realistic than the current ones, but with assumptions that are outside of the mainstream, so that this research is disregarded. Now, this might happen to a man as well, but this divergence at basic assumptions means that personal networks, or path dependency play a larger role in exactly determining what good research is. And you even say that good research is subjective, but I just say that it's even more subjective in economics than in physics, which is why our cultural construct of patriarchy is still more prominent in economics than elsewhere.

I agree with your example of DSGE models: determining whether a macro model is any good or not is pretty subjective, and the old boys network plays a big role in determining whether a new macro model is accepted, or is even publishable. Many macro economists, such as Krugman, complain about this all the time.

However, your example from physics of calculating the course of a spaceship is nonsense. If anyone with "adequate mathematical knowledge" can do this, then it isn't the kind of thing that physics professors are doing.

Here's a real example from physics (that I think I read about on this blog). Demonstrating effects analogous to quantum physics using oil droplets rather than photons seems mind blowingly brilliant to me, and at least to some physicists. However, other physicists dismiss it. One says, “whether one thinks this is worth a lot of time and effort is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I don’t.”

In general, I think much more physics research is difficult to judge objectively. Who really cares about quantum entanglement, other than physicists? However, an economist who comes up with a better estimate of the fiscal multiplier is guaranteed to find an eager audience (even if many economists dismiss Keynesian theory). That's because fiscal policy is of pressing concern to many outside of economics, and many economists are the the business of offering policy advice to those outside of economics.

You won't find agreements between Valerie Ramey and Christina Romer either, just like you won't find agreements between David Romer and Robert Lucas. This doesn't really have much to do with gender (I can name 3 female economists (Ramey, Stokey, and McGratten) off the top of my head who would disagree with Romer and I only have a passing interest in macro theory. These women are huge names in macro, if you don't know them and you talk about female representation in economics you should probably get yourself a little more acquainted with what you're talking about.) as it does with macro in general. It's hard to quantify things in macro and fiscal theory just hasn't been studied very much (or at least it hasn't been studied as much as monetary theory) since RE gained prominence. Remember that macro underwent some pretty serious changes in the mid-70's/early-80's, it took a pretty long time for us to be able to answer any questions after those changes.

When there's talk about gender and economics I often heard people say that it's macro in particular that's an issue, that "New Classical" macro is somehow not something women want to deal with for whatever reason. This could just be me, like I said I'm not very well versed in macro, but I know of far more female "New Classical" or RBC or whatever you want to call it macroeconomists than I know of female NK macroeconomists. Selection bias always plays a part but my interest in macro has always been monetary theory and I've always been drawn to the Woodfordian research agenda more than anything else, very much an NK flavour of macro.

@ Ragout: Yes, the spaceship argument was bad, because it's not 'research', I just wanted to point out that calculations of the course of certain variables yield more diverse results in economics than in physics. Right now, the field can't agree on inflationary effects of an expanded money supply at the zero lower bound, while a physicist can calculate the course of a spaceship in the proximity of a gravitational object pretty well (since Newton, I guess). It's not even a matter of degree, economists can't even decide whether inflation rises or holds steady, i.e. which direction it takes. And @ Anonymous: the lack of agreement does not directly have anything to do with gender. It's just, and I think I have to speak more clearly, that this lack of agreement leaves more room for bullshitting, and I think men have an advantage there, for one, because the tradition of the field and the personal networks protect men more than women, and because I think that men are better at bullshitting than women.

I graduated from medical school in 1971 (I know, old). My class was 95% male. A generation before me, classes were <1% female, and women were told that they were unsuited for medicine. In my time, women weren't told that they were unfit, but they just did not get in. All of this changed very rapidly and without much too do. I lectured sophomore med students in 1976 and was surprised to find the class 35% female. Half and half is the norm now. Social change can happen suddenly, and the underlying mechanisms are less clear than we think.

This will sound strange, but in fields where women and under-represented minorities are rare, those that have/are succeeding get overloaded with "representation". In such a situation senior colleagues and administrators need to think about ways of taking some of that load away (less departmental/college make work committees, etc.).

My (male) grad school perspective is that a lot of intelligent women in economics seem to be more nervous, self-conscious, etc. than their equally-intelligent male counterparts. I have two friends who are a couple in their 2nd year, in the same field, with (likely) the same advisor. The guy frequently talks to the advisor, the girl seems afraid to approach him with any idea for fear of looking stupid.

Part of this might reflect the things Frances discusses. But I'm not sure that's all of it.

@Pesudonymous ,Ok I agree with you this happens all the time but I guess the origin of this problem does not come from girl's side ,maybe this happens because she feels the pre judgement that females gets all the time

I think this is a much larger sociological problem than just a gender problem. Economics is dominated by peer review and peer feedback, whereas other scientific studies can be eventually rewarded by fact in the long run.

Actually it not about economics or academia only, discrimination is in every field, these fields are just reflection of the bigger picture Ask yourself honestly if you have to choose between a male and female engineer (given that everything is equal) you will go for the male If you are choosing between female and male doctor you will go for the male as well even if the female has something better The problem is in our minds I guess we should fix it outside any specific field first

I recently published a piece in the Journal of Investment Management ("Where the Boys Are") quantifying both the numbers and responsibilities of women in institutional investment management. My research suggested that gender-related differences in risk tolerance appears to play a role. If so, then a shift in emphasis from technical education towards attitudes toward risk taking may help things within professional finance.